[luckylion]

Thank you for the explanation!

It's difficult with academic researchers using terms with significantly different meaning from the public at large. I wonder whether it's more harm- than useful, as it'll typically lead to the public either misunderstanding what they say or dismiss them completely because they're "obviously talking nonsense".

The scientific research into echo chambers seems almost straw-man-y, e.g. "echo chambers are perfectly sealed to the outside, no contact whatsoever is possible", so they check and find "that's not really happening" because people might talk about politics with one group exclusively, but will also talk about sports so they're not in an echo chamber. Does that provide value, when they are in a political echo chamber?

[anorakoverflow]

The problem with scientific terminology is widely recognised in communication science. The issue is that while terms used by disciplines such as physics, law or medicine are sufficiently esoteric that someone “on the outside” wouldn’t use their terms casually, so they are somewhat protected from “watering down” their concepts in public discourse—or not, as we are seeing with anti-vax ideology, for instance. Terms in communication science also carry specific meaning to those who know them, but can just as well be interpreted as everyday language by outsiders.

I also get what you mean by “straw-man-y”. I think the issue is that definitions have to be robust and hypotheses falsifiable in order to make them researchable, so they must be kind of stringent. Exactly as you say, someone might be in a political echo chamber, but that is not their entire life. They have peers, family, friends, colleagues that also expose them to political information. By focusing so much on the online, the echo chamber assumption was very limited from the start.